Hard disk drives and other data storage devices may utilize buffers, caches, etc., that use volatile memory such as dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). This allows a host device to transfer the data to the storage device at a high speed and without having to wait for all of the data to be written to the generally slower primary storage media, e.g., magnetic disk. The storage device can write the cached data to the media in the background as time allows. The result is an increase in the apparent performance of the storage device. However, if power is interrupted while cached data is still in DRAM, data loss may result.